; but when Ginger was nine years old his father died,
and Mrs. Stott came to live in Ailesworth where she had immigrant
relations, and it was there that she set up the little paper-shop, the
business by which she maintained herself and her boy. That shop is still
in existence, and the name has not been altered. You may find it in the
little street that runs off the market place, going down towards the
Borstal Institution.

There are many people alive in Ailesworth to-day who can remember the
sturdy, freckled, sandy-haired boy who used to go round with the morning
and evening papers; the boy who was to change the fortunes of a county.

Ginger was phenomenally thorough in all he undertook. It was one of the
secrets of his success. It was this thoroughness that kept him engaged
in his mother's little business until he was seventeen. Up to that age
he never found time for cricket--sufficient evidence of his remarkable
and most unusual qualities.

It was sheer chance, apparently, that determined his choice of a career.

He had walked into Stoke-Underhill to deliver a parcel, and on his way
back his attention was arrested by the sight of a line of vehicles drawn
up to the boarded fencing that encloses the Ailesworth County Ground.
The occupants of these vehicles were standing up, struggling to catch a
sight of the match that was being played behind the screen erected to
shut out non-paying sightseers. Among the horses' feet, squirming
between the spokes of wheels, utterly regardless of all injury, small
boys glued their eyes to knot-holes in the fence, while others climbed
surreptitiously, and for the most part unobserved, on to the backs of
tradesmen's carts. All these individuals were in a state of tremendous
excitement, and even the policeman whose duty it was to move them on,
was so engrossed in watching the game that he had disappeared inside the
turnstile, and had given the outside spectators full opportunity for
eleemosynary enjoyment.

That tarred fence has since been raised some six feet, and now encloses
a wider sweep of ground--alterations that may be classed among the minor
revolutions effected by the genius of the thick-set, fair-haired youth
of seventeen, who paused on that early September afternoon to wonder
what all the fuss was about. The Ailesworth County Ground was not famous
in those days; not then was accommodation needed for thirty thousand
spectators, drawn from every county in England to witness th